Gradual Panic!

I’m sure that in a previous life I’ve sure I’ve mentioned Replay Music the audio recording service but now there’s a new version out there and its just got even better.

Now before I begin I do not condone the acquisition of copyrighted material but I do believe that there are some occasions when a service like Replay Music is necessary.

If you’re not familiar with the past three incarnations of Replay Music then basically it’s a program that records audio streams that come through your PC and converts them to MP3 to keep for posterity.

One of it’s main functions (and please refer to my disclaimer) is that it can pick up streams from services such as Spotify. In older versions you had to tag an edit track information manually but via some sort of black magic it will now automatically pull track an album information from and online database as well as porting it straight into programs such as iTunes and Windows Media player.

It’s dead simple to use and no matter what audio stream is coming through your sound card whether it be YouTube, online radio it will nap it.

There’s even a free trial and the full license is actually less than 13 quid which is backed up with a 30 day money back guarantee. Might be worth a look.

I love my iPad and considering the amount of staff where I work who’ve acquired one since its launch nearly two years ago and especially this Christmas you just get the feeling that the momentum behind the ‘only’ tablet is just going to continue to snowball. But even though they are all converts to Apple’s immature platform the one thing that they all ask for is Windows and Office functionality and finally I can say… you can have it!

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So 2012 is apparently going to the year of the Ultrabook and right on queue they’ve already started arriving in the office, the first offering being the Satellite Z830-10U from Toshiba.

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If you’re like me then you use multiple devices over the course of a day (in my case it can be up to 6) and if like me you like to take notes wouldn’t it be great if you could take a note on one device and then for that note to be synced with all of your other devices? Well up until recently I thought that option was Google Docs which is fine if you’re on a PC or Mac with a full fat OS but I found it be be a little lacking on iOS and Android devices. But worry no longer intrepid note takers as Evernote is here to save the day.

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The initial release of Windows 8 was always going to cause divides, not just the Mac boys vs the the Windows boys, but the Windows boys vs their Windows brothers.

So with that I’ve nipped over to MSDN and grabbed the Developer Preview to give it a whirl. For this first look I’m running it on  an Acer Aspire One netbook with only 1GB RAM and an SSD. So let’s see what this baby can do.

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Ever since the dawn of the netbook and more recently Apple’s departure from physical media I’ve got used to not relying on a CD/DVD to restore my dodgy systems. So how do you reinstall an OS on a computer that won’t let you violate it with a spinning disc? With a USB stick of course.

Previous methods of making a bootable disc (especially for XP) where a tad cumbersome and time consuming. Obviously there are the more nerdy approaches such as creating bootable media using DiskPart but that’s not great for everyone. Well now there is WinToFlash, probably the easiest boot media creator out there.

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